Rolling in the fun with Rollick!

Charades is a game that most everyone has played at one time or another. And while not everyone is comfortable acting in front of others, charades is very popular.

Well, Rollick takes charades and turns it on its head.

In a typical game of charades, one person acts out and the rest of the group or team guesses who or what they’re trying to represent. In Rollick, it’s all reversed – one person guesses while the rest of the team is acting.

And it’s a riot.

While we were skeptical at first, Rollick has soon become THE hit of the party games. Even those who don’t typically enjoy getting up in front of others and acting have had a terrific time playing Rollick. Sometimes it’s hard to be the guesser, not because it’s too difficult, but because you’re laughing too hard at the crazy things people are doing.

Like charades, Rollick is pretty simple to play. You divide into two teams and take turns being the guesser. Then the rest of the team gets up and through their actions tries to get the guesser to guess as many words on the cards as possible before the timer runs out. And it’s up to you to decide how many rounds you’d like to play.

How fast can you act these out?

Can the whole family enjoy Rollick?
The only people in the family that we think won’t enjoy Rollick are the younger children who can’t read yet. If all your children can read, then Rollick is a game that we think you’ll all enjoy. Of course, since Rollick is done as teams, even children who may not be able to read might still want to join in the fun.

We have a traditional charades game that we’ve played in our family for years that we call the “Animal Game”. All you have to do is think of an animal and act it out for the rest to guess. It’s an easy game even for young kids to pick up because they know how to act like a cat or a frog. Of course, as the kids have grown the challenge has become thinking of more difficult animals to act out and guess – like a tadpole, octopus, lemur, or armadillo.

But Rollick has brought new life into our typical charades activities.

Plenty of double-sided cards.

Everyone joins in the fun
As mentioned above, you most likely know people who will opt out of playing charades. What surprised us about Rollick is that even those who initially don’t want to play (because it’s a charades game) end up joining in and having a super fun time.

The first time we pulled Rollick out with a group of adults was at a neighborhood game night. We had 4 people on each team, so 3 people were acting each time. Sometimes they were acting together as a group. And other times they were each doing their own thing – making it really hard to guess what they were trying to portray. It was funny that by the end of the game everyone felt so worn out. Sure the energetic, overacting had something to do with it. But most of the exhaustion came because of needing to catch our breaths from laughing so hard.

Even more party fun for all.

Reverse Charades gives you the same fun option
But Rollick isn’t alone in this new charades fun. We also want to let you know that a game called Reverse Charades is all about the same thing. As the name implies, it’s also all about teams acting out different words for a single guesser. One thing we’ve noticed with both games is that the funniest cards/words are the ones where you need to work together as a team to act it out. As you can see in the Reverse Charades image, “tug o’ war” works great for team acting. But like we said before, even if it’s a word that one person can act out alone it can be hilarious. When you get 5 people each acting out their own rendition of “slow motion” or “hula hoop” it can be a riot.

How do Rollick and Reverse Charades score on the “Let’s Play Again” meter?
Rollick and Reverse Charades are party games that score very high on our “Let’s Play Again” meter. Once you get going, it seems very hard to stop. Inevitably people are clamoring to do “just one more round”. And everyone who has played has said that they’re games that simply must be played at the next party.

Thanks to The Game Chef for Rollick!
and to RETROPlay for Reverse Charades – great games that are taking premier spots on our party games shelf.

Cheryl,
You are correct – 5 really isn’t enough to play. We have 6 in our family and have played 3 vs. 3 and it works ok, but it’s still much funner when you have 3 or more acting out and 1 person guessing. So it’s really best with 8 or more.
One that may work great for your family of 5 is Guesstures. It’s another charades game, but with a cool device that has the cards slipping away as the time ticks by.